Blogs opened up the internet for honest debate. Social media will kill it.

In the early days of blogging, it was an effective counter to bias and misinformation. I’m convinced that the internet is why the gun control debate took a shift in the direction of the good guys in the early aughts and early teens. I think the internet in those days also was the reason for gay marriage succeeding in the courts. And there are several other issues early blogging kind of helped to spearhead.

In the future, the googles, the facebooks, the twitters, the youtubes and all these new social media apps that my kids have started to use can just not let you see something. Sort of like the press does. I think it will come full circle. Only with new gatekeepers.

I agree completely, especially with the growth of gun rights. In the mid-90s, I almost sold off the couple guns I owned. I thought I was a fence-sitter: not an arsenal-owning nut, but I was an owner, and therefore, thanks to Clinton and the media, felt “dirty.” Then the internet exploded, and I discovered that you could be an owner, even a MULTIPLE OWNER, and not be crazy. In fact, it was quite normal. There were a lot of us……

@chiefjaybob, and isn’t it ironic that the very people who demonized and sought to restrict or deny gun ownership and gun carry are themselves surrounded by guns themselves–even hired guns for which we pay! They are the paranoid “gun nuts” because they want to take from others what they have and keep for themselves. It’s what psychopaths and criminals do.

My old blog was hand-coded – not hard, really, and made even easier with simple tools. I paid my hosting fee, accepted no ads, and (most importantly) linked to like-minded bloggers and made a point of attributing everything I republished.

The new kids can do the same, if they wish.

At some point they will get tired of being censored, de-monitized, de-listed, and shadow-banned. If you post on somebody else’s platform, using their tools, and depending on their promotion, then you are working for them for free, and you can be fired or demoted at any time.

It’s not that hard to do it yourself and be free. The key is to embrace a culture of mutual referral, so we can all find each other, and we don’t have to depend on google or Facebook’s rankings.